ContactOffice, pioneer in offering SaaS collaboration and messaging tools to SME’s, will launch a public beta of their new Web Office Suite at the annual Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

While a first beta version had already been made available to early testers in March 2007, the new public beta (v1.1.006) incorporates all collaboration and communication features present in the current HTML-based version of the product, including messaging, calendaring, contact management, document sharing, Skype integration, SMS, fax, bookmarking, notes, etc. The current public beta version is currently only available in English, but the service will soon be made available in all languages currently supported by ContactOffice (English, Spanish, French and Dutch).

The new platform is built entirely on AJAX, a web development technique for creating rich interactive web applications with Javascript, and was developed with the Google Web Toolkit, an open source Java software development framework. The new technology increases the level of speed and usability for end users significantly.

Patrick De Schutter, Co-founder & Managing Director of the company, is enthusiastic about the new version of ContactOffice:

“This new version provides our customers with a faster, more robust user experience. ContactOffice has been around for some time, and the past few years we have been more focused on adding features to the product and building a diverse customer base. A new technological platform and design was a logical new step to take, and I’m incredibly pleased with the result. We can now concentrate on adding more features to become a full-fledged online office suite where businesses are able to operate 100% online. We’re also expanding our service further into France, Spain, The Netherlands and the USA.”

The company’s board has recently decided to look for venture capital to facilitate its growth in terms of functionalities, resellers & affiliates, users, regions and languages. Up until now, the company has managed to fund its own growth, apart from an initial capital investment by Groupe Josi in 2001.

The beta version can be tested on http://beta.contactoffice.com.

The company also made some changes to its main website, http://www.contactoffice.com, and their corporate blog (http://blog.contactoffice.com).